What are the effects of a cashless society on VAT evasion? : A study on Denmark, Finland & Sweden

Abstract: The title of this essay is "What are the effects of a cashless society on VAT evasion –A study on Denmark, Finland & Sweden". Due to an increasingly digitalized world there will be different effects on the economy. We are getting closer to a cashless society every day, but we do not know the consequences that this will have. VAT evasion has long been a problem and has been easy to go through with, due to all the payments made with cash. It would be interesting to see if there is going to be a change in VAT evasion now as we go towards a cashless society. The aim of the study was therefore to answer the question: what are the effects of a cashless society on VAT evasion. To answer this question we focused on collecting data from three Scandinavian countries: Denmark, Finland and Sweden. Many articles were read on the subject before interesting data was collected to be analyzed. The data, mostly gathered from the European Central Bank, included the VATgap, number of payment terminals, number of ATMs, percentage of total payments made with cards, GDP and the Consumer Price Index for each of the three chosen countries. In the theoretical framework the theory around VAT is presented as well as a short discussion about the underlying factors on VAT evasion. There is also a section on how we have chosen to represent the cashless society and how this will be measured in the paper. In order with previous research the hypothesis of the study was formed to be that the VAT gap will decrease as we gotowards a cashless society. Multiple regressions were made on the data collected and the result analyzed. There was no significant relationship found between the VAT gap and any of the three explanatory variables. Instead the VAT gap seemed to be connected to what country that was studied. The coefficients of the variables seemed to indicate that there might be a positive relationship between the VAT gap divided by GDP and the number of payment terminals. The reason for this relationship was discussed to possibly be blamed on the fact that card usage increases the total transactions due to the speed and simplicity of card payments. In order to make the results more reliable it was suggested that the study would be enlarged to include more countries and specifically countries that are less digitalized and perceived to be more corrupt.